


The Different One

by Shewolf2013



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness - Fandom, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dark fic, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 18:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12115050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shewolf2013/pseuds/Shewolf2013
Summary: As Khan wants his crew back, he threats to kill everyone on the Enterprise. What if this happends?





	The Different One

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to Dira, who was a lovely Beta.

A shock woke me up. Another fellow together with the noise of an explosion.

A strange, queasy feeling overwhelmed me. I braced myself, stood up and dressed up in the bathroom. The adrenalin-inebriation made my hands tremble.

A young woman looked back through the mirror. I had a facial expression that seemed to express a combination of tension and disturbance. My eyes twitched anxiously left and right before I bended over to put my trousers on.  
Sometime at the academy I’d made it a habit of mine, to keep the trousers rolled over the boots to be able to jump into them every time, just to not be the last at nightly drills.

I looked up again and watched myself for a moment in the mirror. Now that I wore my blue uniform, I suddenly felt calmer. The adrenalin was still there but in a good way.

An explosion somewhere at the stern brought me to falter, I somehow managed to get support from the wall. I wondered what it was because it wasn’t one single explosion, it sounded more like phaser fire and torpedoes. But who the hell would attack us inside the federation space?

I looked outside the window in the bathroom but I only saw the lightened back of the earth-moon.

I returned in the living room,took my communicator and called the bridge via intercom: “ What’s going on?”

“The USS Vengeance is firing.” Replied Lieutenant Uhura.

To prove that the computer voice said: “Warning, life support systems offline.”

Another explosion. I lost balance and fell against the corner of the table. I lost connection to the bridge. My ribs hurt but my biggest problem was the atmosphere. Life support systems were what kept us alive and without them we would soon be out of oxygen. There were rebreathers in a cupboard down the corridor.

I tried to open the door to the corridor, but it was locked.

“Hell yes! “, I shouted sarcastically. „Computer! Open the door”, still no reaction. Despite my intended composure I experienced a touch of panic. After I invested some physical strength I managed to open the door manually. I ran down the corridor, but security had taken them all. The soft light and the pulsing of the red alert were not helping with the nerves.

I took the corridor to sickbay, someone, preferably Doctor McCoy should take a look on those ribs and besides that the med-bay would be the best place to get oxygen from. Because the oxygen that was still left in the rooms and halls, but it couldn’t last longer than a maximum of twenty minutes. Blame all those drills from the academy that I could still calculate calmly.

Whoever was firing, had not wanted to kill us fast, it felt more like he or she wanted to see us suffer. Vengeance sounded like the perfect name for the ship.

A man in a red shirt ran past me, Tim, I knew him from mess hall. As far as I knew, he used to do night shifts as well. They had woken him up. He Probably was how on his way to engineering to replace blown relays or fix torn apart cables, just to divert some auxiliary power in the live support. The only question was whether he could reach engineering, there were a few decks between down there and here, and everything could have happened on the way; from hull breaches, to radiation lags and raging fires. What a feeling as I realized that I as a scientist in the biochemical department wasn’t able to do anything for my crewmates and the ship. Every mechanic, engineer and every nurse must have been working to help the crew in any way, but I was still looking for a way to be useful.

But after he’d turned around the corner I’d blocked him out, sometimes it wasn’t an advantage when you pay this much attention on your surroundings.  
But had to keep focused.

In front of me the main entrance of the med bay came in sight. I tried not think about in which way hell could befall me there.

“Doctor?” I gasped, entering the medical bay. To my surprise there were no masses of injured, only an lonely Leonard McCoy sat on the floor leaning on a biobed. I lost hope. If Dr. McCoy felt like there was nothing left for him to do, there was nothing left to hope for.

But it was still better to be here right now and not alone in my quarters.

“You should sleep. You had night shift, Lieutenant,” he said solemnly and looked up to me.

I looked at him with a “this-is-not-funny” sidelong glance. I coughed again, because now as my pulse was slowing down I felt the sharp pain again.

“Are you alright?” he raised the McCoy-typical eyebrow.

“Slowly dying.” I quipped and grinned, even when gallows humour was inappropriate, yet, because I was in the hands of the best doctor I ever met, after all.

Now he did the “This-is-not-funny” sidelong glance.

“It looks like Khan acted on his threats.”

“Khan?” He was probably able to hear the incredulity in my voice.

“Yes, he is free.”

This surprised me because when I went to sleep he was still in his cell. “So, the Vengeance is his vessel?”

Leonard stood up and gathered utensils. “No actually it’s Admiral Marcus’ vessel.”

I decide to stop asking. There was no point in knowing more when knowledge couldn’t help me.

He was done with his preparations and stepped up to me. “Sit down,” he tapped on the bed.

“What are you up to?”

“I will examine you. Your coughs don’t sound like lack of oxygen; it sounds like you are coughing up blood. Are you in pain?”

“Yes. Here,” I put my hand on the spot. “Feels like a fracture, I hope it is only a bruise. I made acquaintance with the edge of my table.”

He hitched up his sleeves and ripped open my shirt to get a look on the damage. My right side had already coloured the two bottom ribs in a faint shade of pink.  
“Ouch,” he mumbled with clenched teeth. He was scanning my whole torso with the tricorder.

“Good guess,” he showed me the display. The two bottom ribs were broken the third one had a crack.

“I saw Tim in the hallway. I feel like crap, because I am not able to help in this situation,” I tried to change the topic of our conversation.

“You are taking a too narrow view on this situation, it’s not about the ability, rather the permission. You are, as I am, able to perform a tracheotomy, just because you quit right before your exams therefore you are not allowed to perform one.”

He was totally right.

“Smart of you to come. The med bay is a huge room and we are only two persons. Enough oxygen for five minutes. Five minutes more to live.”

“Leonard, where is your nurse?”

“Dead as the most people aboard this ship. A shelf fell onto her.” He sat back down and started scanning me.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Don’t move.” He gave me a hypospray and started regenerating the bones.

“Okay. Done! Still be careful, there are microfractures I’m not able to repair.” He coughed.

“Thanks, Len. ”

“This is what I’m here for,”, he coughed again. With shaking hands, he turned the rebreather on.

We had to share one rebreather. The light shut off. It looked like the Enterprise was progressively losing systems. He turned on a flashlight.

We decided that it was too dangerous to take an escape pod. Khan would shoot us.

“I’m afraid. We are going to die, aren’t we?” I asked.

“Well, the chances that we will survive are tiny, but we are near earth. Starfleet will find us.” Why was he always this honest.

He put an arm around me.

This could have been romantic scenery, two blue-shirts in the dark, arm in arm.

*

“You should go outside and look for injured people,” I said after a few long minutes.

“The turbo lifts are out of service and we only have one rebreather.”

“You could leave me behind. This would raise your chances to survive.”

“No, you come with me! I need assistance, you were incorporated by me and you are a biochemist. You are technically a nurse.”

“I think there is a rebreather in the biochemistry-lab.”

“Good let’s get over there.”

Opposite to the sickbay was the lab of biochemistry, my workplace. Five hours ago, I was probing Khan’s blood there and now he was the reason why I had to go there again. It didn’t feel as ironic as it could have.

I grabbed a rebreather, flashlight, and two oxygen-cartridges out of a drawer. Leonard gave me a second medkit and we started the tour through the dark and silent Enterprise. A closed door stopped us, probably because of lower air pressure on the other side. As we tried to open it manually we recognized that it was jammed.

We returned to the sickbay.

We tried to get the life-support back online, but failed. You can’t repair what blew into particles.

*

After one hour, we ran out of oxygen, but instead of panic we helped each other to calm down.

We generated a forcefield around the surgery area, the place we were sitting.

I coughed. I felt horrible.

“I suppose we are the only ones who are still alive,” whispered Len and coughed.

I felt a strong desire to breathe but there was nothing to breath in.

Len was the one who became unconscious first. I laid him down and put his head on my knees, held his Hand and felt his pulse. Observing how it became weaker and weaker.

“Lord forgive me”, I murmured, I coughed again, still waiting for my end.

I still don’t know what I had done to deserve that he died in my arms.


End file.
